Troubleshooting - A True Story

[mnewman]

I use Merkaartor to upload and edit Open Street Map (OSM) data.

After a long hiatus I resumed OSM editing and downloaded the latest version of Merkaartor (0.18).

Unfortunately, every time Merkaartor contacted the OSM servers, it suddently quit and the OS created a crash log. I'm not smart enough to decipher crash logs, but the following stood out:

Dyld Error Message:
  Symbol not found: _EVP_idea_cbc
  Referenced from: /usr/local/lib/libssl.0.9.8.dylib
  Expected in: /usr/lib/libcrypto.0.9.8.dylib

Someone on the OSM forum was kind enough to point out that Mac users of other software were also experiencing this sudden crash. It seemed to be related to the fact that some OSX installations have two copies of libssl.0.9.8.dylib, one here /usr/local/lib/ and one here /usr/lib. The former is slightly smaller and quite a bit older than the latter.

I noticed that the symlink pointing to the latter was obviously incorrect:

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32 Sep 13 2011 libssl.dylib -> /usr/local/liblibssl.0.9.8.dylib

I tried correcting the symlink. That didn't work.

I tried pointing the symlink to the newer file. That didn't work.

Finally, I simply got rid of the older version of the file. That worked.

Merkaartor is now running normally.

[trevor]

The version in /usr/local/lib would be something that you installed yourself (or more likely something that was included in the package with something that you installed yourself). What is in your /usr/local directory other than that?

The version in /usr/lib should be the one included with your version of OS X.

Trevor

[mnewman]

Quote: Originally Posted by trevor The version in /usr/local/lib would be something that you installed yourself (or more likely something that was included in the package with something that you installed yourself). What is in your /usr/local directory other than that?

bleach:local boss$ pwd
/usr/local
bleach:local boss$ ls -lea
total 8
drwxr-xr-x  17 root  wheel   578 Jun 13 05:28 .
drwxr-xr-x@ 15 root  wheel   510 May 17 14:24 ..
drwxrwxr-x   4 root  wheel   136 Jan 28 14:15 Qt4.5
drwxr-xr-x  57 root  wheel  1938 Jan 28 14:15 bin
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel   272 Jan 28 14:15 clamXav
drwxrwxr-x   3 root  wheel   102 Jan 28 14:15 doc
drwxr-xr-x   7 root  wheel   238 Jan 28 14:15 dyndns
drwxrwxr-x   5 root  wheel   170 Jan 28 14:15 etc
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel   272 Jan 28 14:15 git
drwxr-xr-x   4 root  wheel   136 Jan 28 14:15 hermes
drwxrwxr-x  16 root  wheel   544 Jan 28 14:15 include
drwxrwxr-x  58 root  wheel  1972 Jun 13 05:54 lib
drwxr-xr-x   4 root  wheel   136 Jan 28 14:15 man
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    27 Sep 13  2011 mysql -> mysql-5.5.15-osx10.6-x86_64
drwxr-xr-x  17 root  wheel   578 Jan 30 06:11 mysql-5.5.15-osx10.6-x86_64
drwxrwxr-x  10 root  wheel   340 Apr 17 04:56 sbin
drwxr-xr-x  12 root  wheel   408 Jan 28 14:15 share

[trevor]

There are a few other references to this issue around the 'net, but nobody seems to have figured out what application is installing this broken version of libssl. For example:

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3548405319
http://musescore.org/en/node/16030

Looking at your /usr/local, there are several things that can use SSL, so might be implicated in installing the bad version of libssl, and that's without even peeking inside /usr/local/bin or /usr/local/sbin. It just looks bad, with that liblibssl link, so I'm suspicious--I don't think that the programmers of, say, git, are that sloppy.

Hmmmm, one thing--the date on the liblibssl link is September 13, 2011:

lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32 Sep 13 2011 libssl.dylib -> /usr/local/liblibssl.0.9.8.dylib

And that is the same date as the mysql link:

lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    27 Sep 13  2011 mysql -> mysql-5.5.15-osx10.6-x86_64

What did you use to install MySQL?

Trevor

[mnewman]

I'm sure I just used the installer package from the mysql web site. I do have a MySQL preference pane in System Preferences.

I had seen those other references to the bad version of libssl; they were pointed out to be by an OSM user.

Here's another oddity. Since removing the bad libssl, Postfix seems to have broken. I run Carbon Copy Cloner early every Friday morning. It is supposed to send me email when it's done. For the first time ever, it did not. Also, I have a postflight script which is supposed to use Postfix to send me email about unmounting CCCs target drive. That also failed.

I've tried sending mail via the command line this morning. Mail sent to an actual address works on and off. But the Postfix aliases table seems to be broken. Mail sent to root is supposed to be aliased to my MobileMe account. It used to work reliably, but no more.

I've run newaliases, but that didn't help.

The mail queue is empty:

bleach:desktop mnewman$ mailq
Mail queue is empty

All very odd.

[mnewman]

Here's what I'm talking about in Postfix. Here's my aliases table:

root: me@mac.com
mnewman: me@mac.com
postmaster: root
MAILER-DAEMON: postmaster
bin: root
daemon: root
named: root
nobody: root
uucp: root
www: root
ftp-bugs: root
postfix: root
manager: root
dumper: root
operator: root
abuse: postmaster
decode: root

But, here's what happens to mail sent to my MobileMe address:

? 2
Message 2:
From mnewman@Bleach.localhost  Tue Aug 16 16:10:28 2011
X-Original-To: me@mac.com
Delivered-To: boss@Bleach.localhost
To: me@mac.com
Subject: alias
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:10:28 +0700 (ICT)
From: mnewman@Bleach.localhost (Mike Newman)

"boss" is the short name of the admin user on my machine. Why is Postfix all of a sudden forwarding mail to a real email address to "boss"?

[dmacks]

The Merkaartor website has two different types of OS X releases...one is described as fully self-contained (having all deps) vs the other being just the main program. Seems like the full one would be less likely to be affected by other breakage on your system.

I see that fink has a much older version of the program (looks like it didn't get updated once qt4 became available there)...I'll try to get together a package of the current version to use a self-consistent set of fink-packaged dependencies and definitely ignore /usr/local

[mnewman]

If you go to the Merkaartor download page:

http://merkaartor.be/projects/merkaartor/files

All you see is the full Mac OSX binaries package. I know he talks about having a "executable only" release, but I never found one.